U.S. experts are concerned that a nuclear accident similar to the Chernobyl catastrophe will occur in the Soviet Union in the next five years and will undermine efforts to promote nuclear power in the United States, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins said Wednesday. The Soviet Union still has 16 nuclear reactors of the type involved in the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, and their operations are "frightening," Watkins told Times reporters and editors at a breakfast session.

The State Lands Commission, in a slap at Gov. George Deukmejian, voted Wednesday to prohibit offshore oil drilling in state waters off Northern California by declaring the region an ocean sanctuary. Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, and state Controller Gray Davis--who together form a majority of the three-member commission--moved to ban offshore oil drilling along 214 miles of the Mendocino and Humboldt County coastline.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American life, he was not thinking of the American presidency. But the dominant historical pattern reinforces Fitzgerald's point. Second terms are seldom as successful as first, often disappointing, sometimes disastrous. Most recently they have been defined by scandal (i.e. Watergate, Irangate, Monica Lewinsky). The core reason for this problematic pattern might be called the duck-and-chickens syndrome.

In his first official foreign visit, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Thursday met with top Mexican government officials here to promote President Bush's vision of a "hemispheric energy policy." Abraham's visit was short on concrete measures, but it signaled the importance of Mexico to the United States' evolving energy strategy and helped build on the new administration's relations with its southern neighbor.

Anyone who as a child looked forward to ordering new books from a colorful brochure handed out in school, or who eagerly thumbed through the "Harry Potter" series, has a soft spot for Scholastic Inc., the venerable educational publisher and purveyor of children's titles. Sad to say, the company has of late been abusing the trust it built over decades as a beloved presence in U.S. schools. A division of Scholastic partnered with a coal industry trade group to produce an energy curriculum for fourth-graders — a poster and related materials — that extols the virtues of coal but neglects to mention the strip mining that degrades the landscape and removes entire mountaintops, the pollution of air and water associated with coal, or its role in global warming.

Concluding that the threat of global warming is serious enough to warrant prompt national action, a panel of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences said Wednesday that the United States could reduce its production of "greenhouse" pollution as much as 40% with little or no economic cost.

A year ago today, half a million or more people marched up Broadway in downtown Los Angeles and surrounded City Hall in a vast sea of humanity. Dressed in white, the multitude held aloft flags, banners and placards protesting a bill in the House that would have criminalized illegal immigrants and anyone who aids them. It was a massive, historic, astonishing event.

A long-awaited pipeline finally is carrying fuel across Texas to help ease Arizona's heavy dependence on California for gasoline and other petroleum products. But like a rescue party cut off at the pass, the newly operational Longhorn Pipeline won't provide relief for overburdened California refiners anytime soon. That's because the Longhorn, which originates outside Houston, comes to a dead end in El Paso.

Most of the San Diego County candidates for the state Legislature believe that education, toxic wastes and transportation are the most pressing issues facing California. Despite widely divergent views on numerous other issues, voiced in interviews with The Times, most of the nearly two dozen candidates running in the county's seven state Assembly races concur on the topics they believe should receive priority in Sacramento next year.

Dating back to prehistoric times, this desert oasis has been known for its abundance of water. Thus the name Las Vegas, Spanish for The Meadows. That was before anyone had heard of perchlorate or plutonium, or envisioned tens of millions of visitors annually, or 1.3 million residents. Some are now beginning to worry that the very commodity that drew settlers here could become the city's Achilles' heel.